Mano Singham, however, does ask.

The reason that I pose these two hypothetical questions is to show the double standard that is operating in the US government and media in their condemnations of WikiLeaks. The reason that WikiLeaks is being treated this way in the US is because people here feel that the US and its government have privileges that no other country or people have.

If we take off our blinkers and see the WikiLeaks revelations through the eyes of people in other countries, we see what a valuable purpose they serve. The cables revealed so far show that foreign governments have been lying to their own people in order to advance American interests. The cables reveal that the leaders of a lot of these countries are acting in the interests of the US rather than of their own people.

I particularly like Mano’s choice for a closing:

As I. F. Stone said, “Every government is run by liars and nothing they say should be believed.” The WikiLeaks revelations expose the lies of these governments. The transparency that WikiLeaks provides is essential if we are to keep governments accountable.

Yes, Izzy would call the government of President Barack Hussein Obama a liar.

I truly believe that in a parallel universe the Ohio Democratic Party got behind Jennifer Brunner’s winning campaign for the United States Senate and she carried the party to sweeping victory across the state. Sadly, we all know what happened in this universe.

Brunner represents a new Democratic Party, one not dominated by old boys and their sycophants. As she leaves her office as an exemplary Secretary of State she leaves a special present for her state and the people who live in it.

“Truth serum” is a psychoactive drug that can be used therapeutically to learn vital information for a functional respite from catatonia or mania.

Why talk about truth serum?

Because we now have our own form of it in Ohio to deal with the unprecedented “Citizens United” U.S. Supreme Court decision.

This year’s mid-term elections saw a listless Democratic base and more money mania than I have witnessed in decades. Corporations gained the status of flesh-and-blood persons and made independent expenditures for and against candidates in state and federal campaigns.

This fall it was like living in the “Wild, Wild West” of campaign advertising. But, one good thing about looking to the “West” is seeing the sun set on the horizon.

As I leave my office at the end of next week, I am pleased to share with you that permanent rules we offered to address the “Citizens United” case in Ohio were approved by the Ohio Joint Committee on Agency Rule last week. They will take effect before I leave office to be in place for future elections.

Here’s how these new rules will empower Ohioans:

1. We’ll be able to know that a campaign ad has been paid for by a corporation, nonprofit corporation or labor organization, how much has been spent and whom they paid for the ad for or against a candidate or committee. They’ll have to disclose it.

2. We’ll know in a campaign ad, itself, that it has not been authorized by a candidate or committee, and we can go to the website of the corporation, nonprofit corporation or labor organization to learn more about who is issuing the message. It must be in the ad, or a media outlet can’t run it.

3. We’ll be assured that corporations and businesses owned 20% or more by foreign citizens are not trying to influence Ohio elections, because under the rules, they can’t.

4. We’ll be assured that corporations, individuals and businesses that have been awarded state or federal money through our state within the last year, are not influencing Ohio elections with independent expenditures, because they can’t.

5. We’ll have teeth in the law to go after corporations, nonprofit corporations and labor organizations and the candidates and committees they support who break the rules and coordinate their efforts.

Even though we can’t change Citizens United in Ohio, we can apply “truth serum” to make sure citizens’ voices remain strong despite its effects.

We have more tools available for us to speak and fight for what we believe in as citizens in the most unique democracy in the world. We can read and learn-and we can advocate.

A new year dawns, and Ohio needs you. I hope you’ll stay involved. I’m wishing you the best in the new year ahead.

The same to you Jennifer, don’t be a stranger.

There used to be a rule in Journalism that reporters were regularly moved among beats to prevent them from getting too close to their sources because it becomes too easy to do small favors for your friends and not mention that little problem that’s come up because there’ll be really good stuff coming down the pike.

As Glenn Greenwald writes, the problem has become epidemic in American Corporate Journalism and the ideal of a Free Press — free from influence by those on whom it reports — is fading quickly.

That’s what so much “journalism” now is: a means of shielding secrets from the public — usually to protect friends and the agendas of “sources” to ensure further access. Ironically, it is that very mentality — the Cult of Secrecy that American journalism has become — that gave rise to the need for WikiLeaks in the first place.

We’re a society in which media and political elites keep secrets compulsively with one another — doing that is one of the hallmarks of membership in those circles — and there are thus plenty of people trained to believe that Good, Responsible People keep substantive secrets from the public.

It’s the same mentality that has spawned the hostile reaction to WikiLeaks: people are happy — grateful even — when institutions keep substantive information from them. Hence:

I want the Government to act in the dark and keep me ignorant about most of what it does;

similarly:

Wired is acting responsibly by refusing to tell us whether Adrian Lamo’s claims about Manning are true or false or to resolve the multiple contradictions he’s publicly affirmed.

In Journalism school we studied how the Press handled the Pentagon Papers and Watergate. The reporters in those cases were held up as American Heroes. How much we have changed. I’d like to be in a class now to hear what the professors and students are saying about WikiLeaks.

From my dad, of course…

My wife was hinting about what she wanted for our upcoming anniversary.

She said, “I want something shiny that goes from 0 to 150 in about 3 seconds.”

I bought her a scale.

And then the fight started…

MYANMAR/BURMA — As Myanmar’s military dictators make their transition from rapacious military men in dress uniforms to rapacious business men in bespoken suits, they’re doing all they can to ensure that their business associates receive all the largess they can handle, specially when it comes at the cost of peasants and endangered species.

From Mizzima:

A class action brought by 63 farmers against a company with close links to Burma’s military junta over land grabs in Kachin State will wind up on Saturday as the state court is to release its verdict, the farmers’ lawyer says.

The subsistence farmers sued Yuzana Company for confiscating family-owned land in Phakant Township, Moenhyin District and had initially named the firm’s owner, junta-linked tycoon Htay Myint as a defendant. After testimony was heard from the remaining witnesses, the court in the state capital of Myitkyina on Monday gave the date for its decision.

“High Court justices Tuja and Myo Tint decided to give the final verdict on December 31,” the farmers’ lawyer Myint Thwin told Mizzima.

Yesterday, after hearing the testimony of Pu Kyi from Yuzana, the court decided to deliver its verdict.

“Pu Kyi could not give any evidence and the other witnesses from Yuzana Company also had nothing to offer. I think the farmers are likely to win in this case,” land-rights activist Bawk Jar, who assisted the farmers in bringing the suit, told Mizzima.

A total of 148 farmers had originally prepared to sue the military and the company, after it had confiscated a total of 1,038 acres (420 hectares) held by the farmers in Warazuap, Aungra, Sharuzuap, Bangkok and Namsan villages. The firm planned to grow cassava and sugar cane as cash crops.

What the hammer? what the chain?
In what furnace was thy brain?
What the anvil? What dread grasp
Dare its deadly terrors clasp?

I think William Blake could have been thinking of the State Peace and Development Committee.

Do what you can to make this a good morning, Myanmar.

It’s been a busy week in Wally World: the Universe’s source of cheap plastic crap. On The Writing On The Wal — the blog USA Today says should be on its readers’ radar — Jonathan Rees and I continue our work dedicated to drawing back the curtain on the Bentonvile Behemoth’s corporate disinformation and other flackery.

WALMART COVERING-UP INVENTORY LOSSES…? Walmart may be the most sued company in the world and that should concern investors, because it is their money, not Walmart’s, that gets paid out. Investors should be extra concerned because a new suit alleges that Walmart is cooking the stock books. Keep reading…

WHAT’S BIGGER THAN CHINA’S MIDDLE CLASS…? Nothing that I can think of, and certainly not our own middle class. There are more people in China’s middle class than there are in the entire population of the United States. Walmart is tapped out here, but not so on Asia’s east coast. Keep reading…

WHEN DEPUTIES DETAIN A POLICEOFFICER… The illegal detention of big-box store shoppers for failing to display their sales receipt for inspection after they have passed through a checkout and made their purchases is one of my favorite subjects. This recording shows how to deal with such thugs. Keep reading…

HEAD I do think that Talaya Soria’s fears are over the line, I don’t think the Department of Homeland Security has the staff to monitor the phone calls of former Walmart employees rightly upset with Walmart’s partnering with DHS to enlist citizens in spying, but then. Keep reading…

CORPORATE WELFARE GOOD… WORKERS BAD… Some of us in Ohio are bracing for the viking strategy of Governor-Elect John Kasich and his Republican minions as they slash and burn their way to a balanced budget that doesn’t inconvenience their Corporate and Wall Street masters. Keep reading…

SHE LOVES WALMART… IN NEW JERSEY… That’s the position taken by Brooklyn resident Shawneequa Clark, according to New York Times writer Elizabeth Harris. Clark doesn’t mind driving across the river to New Jersey to shop at Walmart, but her reasoning is more than a little cockeyed. Keep reading…

HEAD Sadly, I missed the call for this bit of guerrilla theatre, but here’s one intrepid suspicious actor who took to the aisles of a local Walmart and engaged in a variety of suspicious acts. No reports of black helicopters landing in the parking lot have been made. Keep reading…

DOING THE NUMBERS ON ONLINE CHINA… Last week I noted that Walmart had bought into an online retailer in China and that the China’s middle class is larger than the entire population of the United States. 24/7 Wall St. runs the numbers even further: China is no longer a market, it’s The Market. Keep reading…

Happy New Year…!

Via Mano Singham…

From my dad, of course…

My wife and I are watching Who Wants To Be A Millionaire while we were in bed. I turned
to her and said, “Do you want to have sex?”

“No,” she answered.

I then said, “Is that your final answer?”

She didn’t even look at me this time, simply saying, “Yes.”

So I said, “Then I’d like to phone a friend.”

And then the fight started…

MYANMAR/BURMA — On Saturday I wrote about Amartya Sen’s list of 10 actions the world ought to take to help the people of Myanmar. Htet Aung takes up the Nobel laureate’s suggestions and expands on just how their implementation might come about.

From The Irrawaddy:

In light of recent political developments in Burma, which include the military being allocated 25 percent of the seats in the new national and state parliaments, the systemic exclusion of the strongest pro-democracy candidates from the political process, the detention of opposition leaders and activists and a total ban on public criticism of the junta, Sen asked: “What can the world do now?”

During his recent visit to Thailand, the Nobel laureate strongly criticized both Burma’s neighbors like India, China and Thailand and the Western nations for their ineffective policies and immoral relations with the junta, and outlined the following ten points for them to follow if they really want to see change in Burma.

Sen emphasized that a United Nations Commission of Inquiry is a very strong option following the junta’s manipulation of the Nov. 7 election.

Sen’s view is in line with Burma’s pro-democracy leader Aung San Suu Kyi, who recently voiced her support for a CoI during a teleconference with students and academics from the London School of Economics and Political Science via the Al Jazeera television network.

“The National League for Democracy has supported the idea of the commission of inquiry,” said Suu Kyi. “But I think you should make it quite clear that what we are asking for is a commission of inquiry, not a trial of the generals as some people seem to think.

“I don’t think we have looked upon it as a direct attack on the military authorities and certainly we will not like the military authorities to look upon it as a direct attack upon them.”

The United States and several western nations have publicly supported a CoI, but China opposed it and actively lobbied to stop a CoI from being approved during the last UN General Assembly.

As for the Burmese generals, they would certainly view a CoI as external interference in the internal affairs of a sovereign country, no matter whether the UN approves a fact finding mission or a criminal trial.

Of course, short of revolution, only external interference in the internal affairs of a sovereign would ever move the generals from their cash cow.

Do what you can to make this a good morning, Myanmar.

From my dad, of course…

Saturday morning I got up early, quietly dressed, made my lunch, grabbed the dog, and slipped quietly into the garage. I hooked up the boat up to the truck, and proceeded to back out into a torrential downpour. The wind was blowing 50 mph, so I pulled back into the garage, turned on the radio, and discovered that the weather would be bad all day.

I went back into the house, quietly undressed, and slipped back into bed. I cuddled up to my wife’s back, now with a different anticipation, and whispered, “The weather out there is terrible.”

My loving wife of 10 years replied, “Can you believe my stupid husband is out fishing in that?”

And that’s how the fight started…

From My Dad,Humor,And then the fight started

Part II, Part III

MYANMAR/BURMA — Indigenous peoples, first peoples, native peoples are all terms we use to describe those who lived in a place before Western Europeans flooded out into the world in the 16th century. The conquering and subjugation of peoples is common among all nations. I use the term here in the very oldest sense of a people, not the artificial political entities that we have come to label with that description.

From Indigenous Peoples Issues & Resources:

The Karen and other ethnic tribes are being systematically exterminated by a ruthless military dictatorship intent on seizing their tribal lands, which are rich in valuable minerals and other natural resources. Many of the ethnic minorities in Burma are Christian, in a predominantly Buddhist society, and are oppressed and persecuted for their faith. My friend Michael Jones traveled to Southeast Asia with Patrick Klein of Vision Beyond Borders, a Christian relief ministry helping the Karen refugees who have escaped to Thailand. He shot this heartbreakinging story, which I edited. The program features Kirk Cameron as host and narrator.

Post colonial Myanmar is a collection of peoples, of nations, held together by violence. This documentary is mis-titled, I believe. Of all the peoples so harassed, the Karen, perhaps because of their Christian religion or their proximity to Thailand, are the best known and recorded.

Do what you can to make this a good morning, Myanmar.

Now imagine the climb up the mast of a ship at sea when it’s pitching and rolling. Wooden ships and iron men indeed.

*Do I have to do everything for you? Go Google it yourself.

From my dad, of course…

My wife sat down on the couch next to me as I was flipping channels.

She asked, “What’s on TV?”

I said, “Dust.”

And then the fight started…

MYANMAR/BURMA — Governments hate bad press (see Julian Assange) and the more a government has to hide, the more violent it becomes in attacking those who would expose its wrongdoing.

Sithu Zeya, a photographer for the Democratic Voice of Burma, took a picture. It has cost him eight years of his life.

From the Asian Tribune:

Sithu Zeya was sentenced three years for violating the Immigration Act and five years for violating the 1957 Unlawful Associations Act for links he made with unlawful organizations, according to his lawyer U Aung Thein, At some point in cross-examination by special branch police, Sithu Zeya apparently confessed his former relationship with an official from the exile media organization the the Democratic Voice of Burma.

Moreover, he also confessed that he was present at media training in Thailand. The police plaintiff put forward those confessions at the trial. His lawyer said the case will be appealed to a higher court because the evidence shown to the township court was flawed and there were not enough witnesses.

If only Journalists here in the United States were more like Zeya.

Do what you can to make this a good morning, Myanmar.

From my dad, of course…